Bruce Arians Left the NFL Coaching World Better Than He Found It

The former Buccaneers coach helped pave the way for minority coaches and set up better work-life balance for his staff, changing the profession for the better.

Any Super Bowl-winning head coach who tries to nominate himself for sainthood should immediately be scanned through a Bureau-grade fraud-detector examination. One simply cannot reach the highest peak in professional sports without even a little cashing-in of what we’d all consider our standard ethics and morals.

Any Super Bowl-winning head coach walking away from football amid a strange and tenuous quarterbacking situation involving Tom Brady should also trigger a fleet of curious hand-on-chin emojis.

That said, Bruce Arians’s decision to walk away on Wednesday, specifically, as he told former boss Peter King, to give Todd Bowles a crack at coaching Brady and to keep him from a horrifically whitewashed coaching cycle (where he’d almost certainly be low-balled and stuck with a non-competitive quarterback), was about as good as we can ask for nowadays.

In fact, Arians leaves having done more for the profession at a time of true crisis than just about any coach in professional football. For that, we should thank him.

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We know Arians assembled one of the most diverse staffs in football. All four of his coordinators/assistant head coaches were Black. He has the most coaches of color of any team in football. There are two women on his coaching staff, including one in a pipeline defensive position coaching job. Because of Arians, Bowles was springboarded into a head coaching job. Harold Goodwin interviewed for jobs. Byron Leftwich was bandied about for head coaching jobs.

What we know slightly less about in regard to Arians was the way he normalized and somewhat popularized the idea that coaching in the NFL can also mean seeing your family once in a while. One person intimately familiar with the inner-workings of the coach hiring business told me before this hiring cycle that they would be shocked if Bowles took a head coaching job in 2022 because, on Arians’s staff, he gets paid better than some head coaches and gets to leave work at a comfortable hour should he so desire.

There are so many young coaches with developing families who quickly grow cynical of the business due to the long hours associated with working in professional football. While much of the old school wears the coffee-stained sleepless nights as a badge, a hard-and-fast example of how the NFL world works, Arians introduced the idea of seeing your kids’ chorus concerts and little league games.

Since he began talking about his family-forward philosophy publicly, I’ve heard a few examples of head coaches who permit more time at home with their families, more head coaches who discuss the importance of their home life and more coaches who make it a point to integrate their families into the job. While there are still some coaches who don’t leave the office until 2 a.m. every night and expect all their underlings to remain long after they’re gone, retiring to a sleeping bag under a basement furnace at the facility, it seems that number is dwindling.

While Arians’s time in the NFL wasn’t perfect—after building a gender-progressive coaching staff, he aggressively backed the signing of Antonio Brown while Brown was still actively facing a civil suit for sexual assault, which Brown later settled, and only cut Brown after his actions hurt the team on the field—he always had an eye on leaving the coaching world better than he found it.

His signing on as Buccaneers head coach back in 2019 had the smell of a succession plan from the very beginning at a time when the number of diverse head coaches was embarrassingly low.

Bowles’s chance to work with Brady comes at a time of critical optics. Recently, so many head coaches of color, be it Hue Jackson in Cleveland, Vance Joseph in Denver, David Culley in Houston, Steve Wilks in Arizona or Bowles’s previous job with the Jets (which had him cycling between Ryan Fitzpatrick, Josh McCown, Geno Smith and Christian Hackenberg) have gotten gigs that contained trap door situations at the most critical position in the sport. They were destined to fail from the outset.

So often, great head coaches have great quarterbacks. Prospective head coaches become head coaches with access to great quarterbacks by being branded quarterback whisperers. These coaches become quarterback whisperers by working in an almost exclusively white fraternity of coaches who come up through a system together and hire one another incestuously. Pairing the greatest quarterback in NFL history, one who could easily return the team to a Super Bowl, with a deserving and accomplished coach of color is an intentional and significant chess move.

Arians would be the first to admit he’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find another quite like him amid a sea of me-first, legacy-obsessed coaches who only care about how they’re remembered, and not how things look after they’re gone.